16 June 21

The Last Museum featured artworks straddling both real and virtual domains. In this talk, participating artist Juliana Cerqueira Leite (Brasil/USA) reflects upon productive blurring between physical original, digital doppelganger, and the stakes of sculpture online. More info

The Last Museum simultaneously unfolds across six continents and the virtual realm. The project’s experimental format spans both offline and online scenarios, exploring tensions between the universalizing space of the digital and facts on the ground. Principally accessed through kw-berlin.de (for a limited period), the exhibition features all-new commissions exclusively— works that examine the drama of (web)site-specificity and the poetics of infrastructure. Artists: Nora Al-Badri, Nicole Foreshew, Juliana Cerqueira Leite, Jakrawal Nilthamrong, Zohra Opoko, Charles Stankievech. Curator: Nadim Samman
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Claymation, in collaboration with Michael Graessner

In Pedigree (1996–1999, co-produced with Michael Graessner) audio fragments from films by Michelangelo Antonioni and Andrei Tarkovsky provide the acoustic bed of politics and love in which a couple’s passionate encounter unfolds against a melodramatic technicolor sky.

Dear Leonilson, José, Zé, Leo, As you can see, I am not even sure how to address you. When I began to research your work, talking to your colleagues, friends, and family, I learned that each addressed you differently. The question is, why am I writing to you nearly twenty-seven years after your death? As to that, there are many answers, just as you have many names.

From Leonilson: Drawn 1975–1993, KW Institute for Contemporary Art and Hatje Cantz Verlag Berlin, 2020 More Info

„Fahrenbühl is a remote artists’ residence inhabited by two mice. It’s the most beautiful place in the world. Rural life, they say, offers peace and contemplation. And yet, the dreariness of seclusion soon dampens the spirits. Maintaining paradise requires a radical approach. In this respect, a mouse is no different from God.” The latest comic by Anna Haifisch is set in Fahrenbühl – a fictional, remote artists’ residency which becomes an outlet for fundamental questions about artistic production, oscillating between loneliness, ambition, inspiration, and external scrutiny.

Simnikiwe Buhlungu is interested in the mechanisms that produce and mediate knowledge[s]; how it is produced and by whom, its dissemination and its nuances as a commonplace ecology. She uses her practice to wrestle between these questions and their infinite potential answers. Lately, she enjoys listening to gospel music and has been thinking about apiaries. More info

Artist-poet Luzie Meyer traces the property of language to both confine and liberate, and the verbal means of expression available to us in times of digital media and algorithms. More Info

Artist Beatrice Gibson pairs six contemporary poets discussing the topic of love: CAConrad and LeAnne Howe, Alice Notley and Precious Okoyomon, and Ariana Reines and Sophie Robinson. This three-part podcast series makes sonic space in which these poets share, listen and respond to one another’s work, and features unique compositions by Crystabel Riley and Seymour Wright. More info

KW presents an audio serialisation of The Metabolic Museum (2020, Hatje Cantz/KW) written and read by Clémentine Deliss, Associate Curator of KW. Coco Fusco writes in the New York Review of Books, “In ‘The Metabolic Museum’, Deliss outlines her radical curatorial vision and chronicles her attempts to transform the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt am Main from a moribund storehouse of artifacts into a laboratory and educational center for critical engagement with the material cultures of non-European societies.” Regularly, a new chapter will be read by the author and added to the website.

Prologue to The Metabolic Museum

Manifesto for The Post-Ethnographic Museum

Walking Through

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Mutiny on the Bivalvia is a radio play about power and relationships. In an interview, a seafarer and previously successful artist delineates her motives for wanting to become a member of the female crew on board of the „Bivalvia“ and her daily life as a seafarer. The interviewer has but one question on her mind: What has lead the all-women crew to shipwreck and mutiny? More info

Lecture + sonic reply with curator Nadim Samman and techno producer Inland (Ed Davenport). The myth of Orpheus tells the story of a musician and poet who charms his way into the underworld, to recover a love stolen away and imprisoned. At the birth of the modern world, this myth would become the basis of an initiatory cult exalting the status of the artist for their ability to cross thresholds between worlds and (re)capture knowledge. Today’s Orphic journeys foreground the functional texture of searching: The labor of finding one’s direction inside the thing—all the wrong turns, and right ones too—cutting fences; picking locks; crawling through gaps. Diving deeper into the megastructure in order to move beyond it. More info

Thea Reifler and Philipp Bergmann invited Lou Drago, Isabel Lewis, Ann Mbuti and Omsk Social Club for exchanges of thoughts departing from science fiction quotes. They sat down to talk about how the genre has influenced their ways of thinking, relating, creating art and programming institutions. Within the conversations, they discuss how it changed their perceptions of truth and fiction, dreamtime and world-time, structures and processes as well as change and collaboration. More info